The God Patent (5 page)

“Yes,” Ryan said, “and to the computer, right and wrong means making the best choice for the user—after all, the user is God. Get it?”

“Yeah, I get it.” He cocked his head to one side. “Ryan, you’re on ice so thin you’re about to fall into H-E-double-hockey-sticks.” He read more of the patent submission and added, “This is okay. You know, it might even work.”

“I’m glad you approve,” Ryan said. “Get a price on the blue Ski Nautique—and a slip. Where should we keep it?”

Ryan resumed typing with Foster looking on. He stopped and asked, “What does the Bible say about the soul, anyway?”

“If you’d ever read the Bible, you’d know that it doesn’t say much about the soul.” Foster wheeled his chair back into his cube and took a worn black leather Bible from a shelf. “There’s something in Ecclesiastes.” He flipped to a page and read aloud:
“‘Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.’” Flipping to another page, he said, “And, of course, there’s a psalm—there’s a psalm for everything—‘By the Lord’s Word the heavens were made; by the breath of his mouth all their host.’ The word
soul
is used a lot to refer to people, but that’s about as much as there is distinguishing the physical, His Word, from the spiritual, His Breath.” Foster leaned over and dug through a box and then held up an old paperback,
The Philosophy of Man and Spirit
. “Fortunately for you, other misguided Catholics, Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Augustine, spent a lot of time trying to figure it out.” He handed the paperback to Ryan but hugged the Bible to his chest.

“If they grant this patent,” Ryan said, “I’ll hold the rights to every thought any Christian ever had.”

“I wish you wouldn’t say things like that.”

Two hours later, Ryan sent the patent submission form to the printer. On his way to pick up the hard copy, he leaned into Foster’s cube. Foster was typing away with the Bible open in his lap and two paperbacks, each written by a physicist, Steven Weinberg’s
The First Three Minutes
and George Smoot’s
Wrinkles in Time
, on his desk.

Ryan read the file name. “A power generator?”

Foster said, “Yes, this is something that’s bothered me for a long time. Back in college my physics professor used to go on and on about energy and time. These books do too. They use the word
symmetry
a lot, as though energy and time are somehow like left and right, as if you can’t have one without the other.” He looked up at Ryan. “God created the universe from nothing, but physics insists that you can’t get something from nothing. Think about it. The universe had to come from somewhere, so there must be conditions that allow energy to come from nothing—the conditions of Creation, the perfect power generator!”

“Is there anything in Genesis other than ‘and God said, let there be this, that, or the other’?”

“It was ‘this, that,
and
the other,’” Foster said, shaking his head and smiling. “Genesis may be short on details, but it’s irrefutable.”

“Doesn’t the Bible say that the universe is like six thousand years old?” Two vertical lines formed in Ryan’s brow.

“If you add up the ages of everyone from Adam, yes, you get about six thousand years. And, also yes, these physicists have evidence that the universe is almost fourteen billion years old. The thing is, though, Genesis is the Word of God and the Big Bang is a theory that’s still being developed.” He tossed
Wrinkles in Time
to Ryan. “Have you heard of
inflation
? It’s one of the things they had to add to the Big Bang theory, an epoch when the universe expanded really fast. Surprise! Science discovers something that shortens their measurement of the age of the universe and moves the theory closer to the description in Genesis. It’s still got a long way to go, but the scientists will get it right eventually.”

Ryan balanced the book on the partition between their cubicles, hesitating before broaching the sensitive topic. “Why are you obsessed with the Bible being literally true?”

Foster and Ryan had been close friends for five years. They shared affection for boats, cars, and sports. Ryan understood that Foster was a devout Christian. It seemed as though Foster was okay with Ryan’s essential indifference to religion until this topic came up.

“Even if it was inspired by God, the Bible was still written by men,” Ryan said, “men who didn’t know the first thing about quantum physics or relativity or evolution. Even if God had told them the whole story, how could those guys have written it down?”

“The Bible is the Word of God, verbatim.” Foster looked back at his monitor and resumed typing. A few minutes later, he looked back at Ryan and added, as if to make peace, “Though it would be convenient if the description were more mathematical, and please don’t get me started about evolution.”

Dodge refilled Ryan’s glass and said, “So you and your buddy developed these patents so you could buy a boat?”

“Yeah,” Ryan said. “Even if they had any value, GoldCon has all the rights.”

“Are they totally bogus?”

“Actually, the one I wrote, my patent of the everlasting soul,” he laughed at the thought and the memory of Foster looking aghast at the concept before proceeding to write his own version of Creation, “has some neat ideas in it about training neural networks and some cool optimization algorithms, but I never got a chance to develop them.”

“What about the other one?”

“I never really understood it. Whenever religion came up, Foster got kind of weird, so when he tried to explain it, I just sort of nodded. But he’s a smart guy—who knows?”

Dodge looked at the desk. He slid the revolver over and spun it around. When it stopped spinning it was pointing at his empty glass. He said, “Last week, someone bought the rights to those two patents—a university.”

“What university?”

“Does Evangelical Word University ring a bell?”

“No.”

Ryan lay awake in his sleeping bag that first night in Nutter House. When cars drove by, lights flashed off the tarnished copper work on the ceiling. It reminded him of the day GoldCon’s CEO had presented a plaque to each of them. That the patents were granted had caught Ryan by surprise. At first he’d felt uncomfortable cashing the big checks—the company split the $5,000 for each patent between them; together they had four checks for $2,500—but it didn’t bother Foster. He said they should trust the patent office, that it had happened for a reason. They were skiing off that blue boat the following weekend.

Ryan listened to the sleepy old house creak and settle. It was hard to get comfortable, not just because the foam under his sleeping bag was lumpy, but because he wanted to go home.

He started dozing off, and a vision of Linda and Sean woke him. He thrashed around, trying to think of something else, anything that could shake off the melancholies. It was harder at night. These internal battles always ended the same way: an image of Sean—half daydream, half nightmare. He’d be thirteen by now, wearing cleats, pads, and a helmet, walking home after being cut from the team and blaming his absent father for not being there to teach him football’s
X
s and
O
s. Ryan couldn’t stand the fact that he had abandoned Sean, just like his father had abandoned him. Linda had thrown Ryan out when Sean was about the same age Ryan had been when his father died.

Someone coughed down the hall. Ryan got up, put on his pants, and stepped toward the door. He opened it and looked down the dim hallway, up at the ornate crown molding, and realized what he was doing. Without even considering it, something lurking in his brain, the monkey on his back, was requesting a few hits of meth to make everything all better.

He hung his head and sighed. Would it ever get any easier?

Stepping inside his apartment, he closed the door and paced in front of the window. He listed everything in his life that was getting better. Every step that took him closer to a life where he could be with Sean and make a living solving technical puzzles was a good step. Any step out that door in search of a chemical nightmare was a bad step. When he finished, one thing stood out: he had a room in a nice house in a good town and, if not a bed, at least a soft, warm place to sleep.

Ryan lay back down and pulled the sleeping bag around him. Visions of the past mixed with hope for the future. He thought of his old friend and wondered where Foster was now. Probably sleeping peacefully with his wife—he ended up marrying the aerobics instructor. Ryan wondered if Foster knew that a university had bought the rights to their patents.

T
he way that mathematical symmetry appears in nature is as elegant and beautiful a thing as there is in the universe.” Professor Emmy Nutter loved teaching the first term of senior-level quantum physics. Thirty of the University of California’s finest faced her in an auditorium with a capacity for three hundred.

“We’re going to take our time with this derivation, okay? I want you to feel this. It’s what art students feel when they study Renoir, what music students feel the first time they play Brahms, what computer science students feel when they learn—I don’t know—queuing theory?” Emmy smiled, giving the class permission to laugh. Turning back to the board, she tossed her long wavy hair out of her eyes. Her hair was currently brown with blonde streaks. She’d been dyeing it different colors since she was ten and wasn’t sure what its natural color might be—blonde like her mother’s, brown like her father’s, or black like her brother’s.

She drew symbols on the whiteboard with a black pen, symbols in a language as arcane to most people as druidical runes, but this really was the language of nature. It was this mathematical purity that had drawn Emmy to physics.

“We start with a general wave function.” She scribbled a Greek letter on the whiteboard. “Let this symbol describe the evolution of a system in space and time. It could be a hydrogen atom, a black
hole, the mold growing on your roommate’s pillow, anything you want. Now watch, multiply it by this function of time.” She turned back to face her class. Two young men, Mike and Rob, sat in the front row, overachieving A-students wearing Society of Physics Students sweatshirts with an image of Einstein and the caption “I’d have written this in four dimensions, but I didn’t have the spacetime.” To Emmy’s left, Tran, a thin, pale Asian man in a pressed Oxford shirt with a razor-sharp part in his hair, stared back. A month ago Tran had been tentative, afraid to demonstrate ignorance. Now, when he had a question, he blurted it out as a challenge without even raising his hand. Lori, the only female student, sat ten rows back in the center of a cluster of young men. Lori disappointed Emmy. No stranger to being the only woman in a room of men, she hoped Lori would grow into a scientist. Instead, she sat there playing soap opera games with her boyfriends.

Emmy said, “The function of time resets the clock. That’s all. You can think of it like daylight savings time. Can you think of a reason that the system should behave differently by resetting the clock?” She watched the class, encouraging them with a smile here, a little nod there.

Mike and Rob whispered to each other.

Emmy turned back to the board. “Let’s see what happens when we apply the principle of least action—remember from last year? The universe is lazy. In going from one state to another, a system takes the easiest way possible. Balls roll downhill, frat boys barf at parties, stars cool as they expand.”